Place & Route (Noob Question)

[Altera_Forum]

Hi All, 

 I am new to Altera devices and am wanting to know the function of the Quartus II fitter. Is the place and route fitter used to customize placement 'inside' the actual Altera device? Is it possible to use Quartus II to design a board where the device is just one of many components? If not, would one typically use Mentor Graphics/Cadence tools for this?  Just a little background, I've purchased a Cyclone III device (EP3C40) that was soldered to a custom pcb. I'm hoping to design my own at some point as well after solidifying my HDL design.  Well, any info is nice so let me know what I can to get started with this.  Thanks!

[Altera_Forum]

place and route is referring to the design inside the FPGA, you can't do the rest of your project with Quartus itself - though you will need to work closely with whoever is doing the board design on the I/O assignments of the FPGA 

 to do the board you need a schematic/layout package. there are high end tools like Mentor and Cadence or low end tools like Eagle and DipTrace. there should be no problem doing a Cyclone design in a low end tool, but Arria and Stratix designs would probably benefit from some of the features of high end tools - for example HyperLynx signal integrity simulation

[Altera_Forum]

Awesome, that's exactly what I needed to know. Thanks for the quick reply. 

 -doddy